Good Morning, Islanders Country.
Sixty-five minutes. Eight shootout rounds. One goal.
It just wasn’t theirs.
Monday night in San Jose was supposed to be the get-right game. The Islanders came in as road favorites against a Sharks team that had lost five straight and carried one of the worst goal differentials in the league. Instead, they left with an eight-round scoreless 3-2 shootout loss, a fourth straight game without a win (0-2-2), but more alarmingly, they seem to be moving away from the type of hockey that made them successful.
Early this season, you could see exactly what Pete DeBoer wanted the Islanders to become. They were structured. They were patient. They protected the middle of the ice. They made good decisions with the puck. Most importantly, they made opponents earn everything.
Lately, they’ve drifted from that.
"We know what our really good game looks like. Just we haven’t been doing that these last five games for a full 60. We’ve shown stretches of it. But again, we just need to be a lot better for 60 minutes.”
Monday night’s 3-2 shootout loss in San Jose extended the Islanders’ winless streak to four games, and this one felt different from the losses to Edmonton, Carolina and New Jersey. The Sharks are talented, but they are not one of the East’s established powers. And yet the Islanders spent too much of the night pinned in their own zone, struggling to generate a forecheck and giving up chances through the middle.
“We know what our really good game looks like, Horvat added. “Just we haven’t been doing that these last five games for a full 60. We’ve shown stretches of it. But again we just need to be a lot better for 60 minutes.”
Ilya Sorokin made 37 saves and gave them every chance to steal the game, but that was never supposed to be the formula. DeBoer’s system worked because it reduced the amount of chaos Sorokin had to clean up.
Right now, there’s too much chaos again.
The Islanders were better in stretches Monday, as DeBoer acknowledged, but not for long enough. Too many self-inflicted mistakes. Too much time defending. Not enough sustained pressure.
It’s not a crisis. But it is a skid.
And more importantly, it feels like the Islanders have lost their way a little.
The quickest route back probably isn’t finding more offense. It’s remembering what made them effective in the first place.
